Kids
in more than 150 countries — and President Obama —
dabbled in computer programming as part of the recent
weeklong Hour of Code (hourofcode.com) initiative,
dreamed up to introduce anyone as young as 4 to the fun
of creating technology, not just using it.

Whether
your kids’ elementary, middle or high school
participated in the movement, they (and you) can try
writing code at home with free introductory lessons from
Code.org/learn (code.org/learn). Those include online
tutorials with Anna and Elsa from "Frozen" or
with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Angry Birds. (No
device on hand? There are even "unplugged"
tutorials using old-fashioned paper and pencil.)

Older
kids can try tutorials with Khan Academy, the
not-for-profit started by a former hedge-fund analyst
who was asked to help his niece with her math homework
from afar. None of Khan Academy’s Hour of Code lessons
require experience, but they’re designed primarily for
ages 8 and older. Even so, a teen who’s already taking
an app development class might scoff. "We’re
writing real code," one such son told a colleague
of mine.

Working
partway through the Hour of Drawing with Code (khanacademy.org/computing/hour-of-code)
mobilized a branch of my brain that had been napping
since college calculus — though it in fact required
only rudimentary math. The in-my-head calculations
necessary to draw the horizontal line in a capital H
hurt a little, but nailing it never felt so satisfying.
(One grumble: I wish I could disable the prompt that
superimposes over my typing; it would be easier to see
what I was doing. Maybe I can learn how to do that in
another lesson — which is not to imply that I would
use my new capabilities to hack into Khan’s system!)

At
my 8-year-old daughter’s school, some kids earned
their Hour of Code certificate using Lightbot (lightbot.com),
a drag-and-drop app that she excitedly introduced me to
after school. We collaborated in a new way to solve two
of the puzzles together, which increase in difficulty
with each level. The player chooses codes and arranges
them in an order that moves the little Lightbot through
a geometric arrangement to its finish line, not unlike a
board game. Doing so is now a shared joy that will fill
the hours on the road to our holiday destination:
Grandma’s house.

Code.org
CEO Hadi Partovi recuited Obama to kick off the Hour of
Code on Dec. 8 at the White House. The single line of
JavaScript that Obama typed, alongside students from a
Newark school, was this:

moveForward(100);

"That
code is all it took to get Elsa to move 100 pixels to
finish drawing a square," Partovi said afterward.
"Drawing a line to finish a square isn’t rocket
science. And that’s exactly the point. That’s how
computer science starts. You don’t write a
fully-fledged game when you write your very first line
of code, you write something as simple as PRINT
"Hello World."